Today is Earth Day and incidentally it feels as if spring is finally coming to New England. What a perfect morning.

Apropos green initiatives: Michael Osterman wrote a blog post last week with some surprising findings. He questioned respondents in his most recent survey whether “green” computing was a criterion in their decision-making process for new messaging server purchases.

The answer was “not much impact at all”:  53% of organizations said that green computing would play little or no role in their purchase decisions; only 2% told us that it would be a critical part of the decision-making process.

That is remarkable, since many companies are investing heavily in server consolidation and virtualization, which often significantly reduces their overall power consumption. According to Osterman, servers consume about 1.2% of the total power output in the US alone.

Perhaps it proves the point that market forces are still the best drivers for environmental progress. Just as SUVs became less popular with rising fuel costs, the push for greener data centers is largely driven by the need to improve a company’s bottom line through savings on power and cooling.